The Lover

Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen.

But I believe I’ve heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they’re going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life.

What I’m doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I’m talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried.

Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it.

I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where.

In the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach to the horizon. It flows quietly, without a sound, like the blood in the body. No wind but that in the water.

You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spent a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without and consequences and without any cause, human or other.

Dresses that were neutral, plain, very light in color, white, like summer in the middle of winter.

My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women.

She goes along the street still, above the history of such things however terrible.

The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach.

It’s in this valor, human, absurd, that I see true grace.

My younger brother. Dead. At first it’s incomprehensible, and then suddenly, from all directions, from the ends of the earth, comes pain.

People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it’s happened before and it happens still. It doesn’t ever announce itself as such----it’s duplicity itself. It doesn’t exist in detail, only in principle.

Immortality is not a matter of more of less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown.

For centuries, because of the ships, journeys were longer and more tragic than they are today. A voyage covered its distance in a natural span of time. People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death.